Today, we’ll continue to investigate Dr. Morris’s book, The Measure of Civilization, now in chapter 3 titled Energy Capture. This is the first of the four traits used to calculate the Social Development Index (SDI), which Dr. Morris computed from the end of the last Ice Age to the present for both the East and the West to compare the differing stages of development of the two regions over this 14,000-year period. In chapter 3, we will learn how to compute the Energy Capture score for the Ubaid.
If you haven’t read the prior posts and videos related to Dr. Morris’s historical perspective and model, or you’re starting to lose perspective on the enormous breadth of his study, you can certainly benefit from watching (or watching again) this video on the book we’re studying.
Dr. Morris starts the chapter saying, “Leslie White argued 70 years ago that energy capture has to be the foundation of any attempt to understand social development.” He then goes on to explain that all “complex arrangements of matter” must draw energy from their environment to produce any form of work, and this is especially true of all forms of life. In our present study, we’re talking about humankind, plants, and animals consuming energy and transforming it into other forms.
By “energy capture,” Morris means “the full range of energy captured by humans,” the most important being:
Food, “whether consumed directly, given to animals that provide labor, or given to animals that are subsequently eaten;”
Fuel, “whether for cooking, heating, cooling, firing kilns and furnaces, or powering machines, and including wind and water power as well as wood, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power;”
Raw Materials, “whether for construction, metalwork, pot making, clothing, or any other purpose.”
Morris justifies this definition as broader than usual measures of physical well-being e.g. real wages, GDP per capita, Gross National Product per capita, and National Disposable Income per capita. These latter indices are convenient for economists, but if we pause for a moment we recognize that these basic economic statistics are inaccessible when we look back beyond the last few hundred years, and especially so in prehistoric times. In fact, these statistics would be derivatives of Dr. Morris’s analysis.
The Cook Framework
Dr. Morris tells us that there is a huge body of literature on human energy use, produced by diverse researchers from the fields of medicine, engineering, natural and social science, and others. Very few have tried to present an historical insight, much less prehistorical. Morris begins with Earl Cook’s work, as summarized in the graph below:
Source: Morris, “The Measure of Civilization,” 55.
The “early agriculturalists” would be our Ubaid farmers in Southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 BC. The “advanced agriculturalists” would be in Northwest Europe about 1400 AD; “industrial society” in Western Europe about 1860, and “technological societies” in North America and Western Europe around the 1950’s. The above diagram has become the starting point for historians of energy capture.
Cook’s division between food and nonfood energy is the key insight into the subject. Morris points out that humans can only work within the range of 2000 to 4000 kilocalories per day: under 2000 and energy and health fail, above 4000 and the problems of obesity prevail, including an early death.
Morris makes the further distinction between “cheap” and “expensive” calories. Since it takes 10 calories of plants to produce one calorie of meat, we could take in our calories cheapest by consuming grain, and most expensively by eating meat. Thus, the modern western daily diet with plenty of meat and dairy products (while under the 4000-kilocalorie cap) costs around 10,000 kilocalories. With the cap on eating met at the outset, the big future changes came from the consumption of non-food energy.
Let’s look at Morris’s analysis of the people we’re interested in: Tigris-Euphrates Persian Gulf (TEPG) Valley Ubaid hunter-gatherers and Ubaid early agriculturalists in the TEPG and Southern Mesopotamia.
Hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers don’t use a lot of nonfood calories, and these mostly as “biomass for cooking fuel, clothes, weapons, baskets, personal ornaments,” cargo sled poles, lean-to supports etc. In their simplest societies, per capita energy use would be about 4000 to 5000 kcal/cap/day. Morris compares this with today’s global average of 50,000 kcal/cap/day and the USA at 230,000 kcal/cap/day.
Early agriculturalists. Throughout most of history, which includes our Ubaid moving up from hunter-gatherers, mankind had little ability to convert non-food energy into food. Morris says that this inability was “the major brake on both population size and rising living standards.” He introduces Thomas Malthus and his Essay on the Principle of Population where he elaborated this braking principle.
Despite the limitations confronting the Ubaid, they had modest opportunities to increase food production through non-food energy capture, e.g. livestock and draft animal manure as fertilizer, transportation of food from farms to markets, and use of biomass fuel to cook food, allowing the human consumption (digestion) of more kilo-calories from a given amount of food, and, though they were unaware, killing off harmful bacteria.
Morris points out the irony that not until the time of Malthus were “transport, processing, fertilizers, and scientific interventions revolutionizing the food supply, relentlessly increasing stature, life expectancy, and health.” Morris also points out that social scientists interested in long-term economic history “regularly ignore the food/nonfood calories distinction and, focusing solely on food, conclude that between the invention of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago and the industrial revolution 200 years ago nothing much happened.” Morris points out that, in fact, nonfood energy capture increased steadily.
Morris credits Cook for determining that Hunter-gatherers captured just 2,000 kcal/cap/day of nonfood energy, while our Ubaid early farmers raised this to 8,000 kcal/cap/day. Morris then notes that nonfood production in Roman Italy – “the core of the most advanced ancient agrarian empire—may have reached 25,000 kcal/cap/day.” He also says that no one could break through that record for 2,000 years. And then came fossil fuels and the industrial revolution, not just in manufactured goods, but also in manufactured fertilizers and farming equipment—which is now, as we study this, ready to launch into genetically modified foods and another leap in productivity. Thus, man was freed from the Malthusian trap, for now.
The following table has been built on Table 3.1 in his book, but I added the columns Ubaid Location and Ubaid Occupation, and cut off the table at 3500 BC after the Uruk Culture emerged from the Ubaid in about 3800 BC. Dr. Morris’s table goes up to the year 2000 AD.
TEPG = Tigris-Euphrates Persian Gulf Valley (now flooded)
Next week, we’ll resume working our way through the book, mapping out the Ubaid scores on each trait, until we have their SDI index over their epoch.
That’s enough for today.
Thanks for visiting,
R. E. J. Burke